MWC – Gionee Elife S7 Hands on

Gionee announced the Elife S7 flagship today cementing themselves as a player on the European stage. It is a lovely device, and it is incredible light and skinny. Gionee are very keen to point out the camera features on the phone as you will see in the video below.

The parallel edges on the device do genuinely enhance the grip of what would be a very slippy phone. The downside of having such prominent edges to the phone doe mean it can be fiddly to get tot he volume buttons and the power keys as they are inset in to the groove between the edges.

Perhaps this is a deliberate thing to help prevent accidental activation whilst it is your pocket. With Gorilla Glass 3 both front and back the phone will be protected from scratches and scraped. However bear in mind the glass does cause it to be a fingerprint magnet, you will need to keep a cloth nearby at all times!

The camera sensor is the smallest 13 mp camera in the world and it doesn’t protrude from the back at all unlike some of the other super skinny phones that are sticking out like the iPhone 6. It is one the fastest sensors as well, being able to capture the image in 500 milliseconds and focus in 300 milliseconds. Meaning that you should never miss that all important shut due to shutter lag. Up front we see a an 8mp Selfie camera. The software underlying these cameras have mode that will allow you get the best out of the camera whatever the occasion. the one that they were particularly keen to talk about was the Beauty Mode which will not only enhance your selfies but it will also estimate your age and gender.

They have also made sure that 3.5mm jack on the phone is full size. They have also put hi-fi class stereo headphones in the bundle witch is niece to see with more and more. The Audio is powered by DTS Technology and these guys have worked directly with Gionee to give the best audio experience possible.

The brains behind this beauty is from Mediatek 6752 True OctaCore 64 Bit. This is supported by 2gb of Ram and 16 Gb of Memory. This all powered by a 2750 mah battery. This seems to be quite a small unit but Gionee have thought about that and they have implemented various different power saving modes to help eek out the battery life to 2 days. There is then a ultra power-saving mode that turns the device into a dumb-phone.

Specifactions

WCDMA 900(850)/1900/2100MHz GSM 850/900/1800/1900MHz

TDD LTE B38/39/40 FDD LTE B3/7/8/20

Dual Sim

5.2″ Super AMOLED FHD（1920×1080）PPI=424 , Gorilla Glass 3rd

139.8mmx67.4mmx5.5mm

13.0 Mpxl AF+8.0 Mpxl Front camera

Amigo OS 3.0 based on Android 5.0 Lollipop

Mediatek 6752 Octa-core 1.7GHz CPU, 2GB of RAM

13.0MP rear camera, LED flash, AF, and 8.0MP front-facing camera

16GB of built-in memory

2750mAh battery

Here are a few more pics of the black version of the phone

It is a pretty well specified device and definitely has a lot of potential for the UK Sim free market where it will arrive as a re-branded device under the Kazam brand later this year, with an suggested RRP of €399.